Jazz Dance Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Jazz Dance - Essay Example Jazz dance hasgreatly been affected by communal dance and common music. This paper is intended to describe history and development of jazz dance. Rhythms and movements that were brought to America by African slaves have come upon the origin of jazz dance. The style of African dance is all natural; low, knees bent, vibrating body movements emphasized by body isolations and hand-clapping. As slaves immigratedto America, starting during the 1600’s, Africans from different cultures wereseparated from their families, languages and tribal traditions. This resulted to merging of African cultures that created a new culture with both European and Africancomponents. The Slave Act of 1740 intended to prohibit slaves from performing African dances, but that did not hide their wish to grip to those parts of their cultural identity. African dance involved movements and rhythms which includedhand-clapping,foot stamping and tapping, and currentlythis is known as a jazz dance. The term "Jazz" was initially related to a genre of music dance during World War I. Jazz in a dance form, however, emerges from the parlanceAfricans’ dances when they were being brought to the Americas on slave ships. This form of dance emerged together with jazz music in New Orleans at the beginning of 1900s. From 1930s to 1960s, Jazz dance changed from this body of parlanceinto a theatre-based performance form of dance that needed a much trained dancer.During this time, dancers from the ballet and modern dance worlds experimented with the jazz dance style. All of these dancers affected jazz by wanting many trained dancers to perform a given set of movements, which was very different from the informal form of New Orleans back in the 1900s. Also, during this span of period (circa. 1950) jazz dance was intensely affected by Caribbean and other Latin American dance styles which were established by anthropologist and dancer Katherine Dunham. Jazz is also like choreography too. Jazz dance throughout